Official Unity plan pricing and packaging updates

Back in the PS2 era, there was an engine called Renderware. It made it easy to develop games for the convoluted PS2 architecture, and was one of the first engines that allowed studios to port their games for other platforms without having to rewrite almost everything from the ground up. It was incredibly popular, being used in hit games like the GTA trilogy.

Then EA acquired Criterion, the company behind Renderware. Right away other studios expressed worry that EA would use their newly gained control over the engine to harm their competitors. EA stated nothing would change, and Renderware support would not be affected.

Less than two years later, the engine was dead, and the promised next gen version for PS3 and Xbox 360 was cancelled.

 

Unity was underpriced as is, so the price to use it going up should be expected. But looking at their 10K's more and more, it's clear how desperate they are and the scope of mismanagement that has essentially blown what was a dominant position.

 

It's not like any of your F***ing business, but I'm on leave from the beginning of the week and Unity chose to F*** up my plans to rest.
Any other personal tidbit so you don't have to concentrate on the real issue?

 

It does warrant a closer look, though. All numbers rounded down, from the institutional shareholders lists. This is public.

Unity:
Vanguard: 29m shares (under 2 funds)
Blackrock: 14m shares
State Street: 5m shares

Ea:
Vanguard: 33m shares (under 3 funds)
Blackrock: 25m shares
State Street: 13m shares

Tencent holdings:
Blackrock: 900k shares (3rd largest)

Activision-blizzard:
Vanguard: 100m shares! (Under 3 funds)
Blackrock: 56m shares
State Street: 32m shares

Go ahead, see for yourself.

 

I...
didn't want to think about it.

 

That is the thing, anyone can say you own him a billion anytime.

This does not mean that you have to pay it, if for example the amount of installs is not same as sales can just take this to court as fraud.

Somehow i doubt Unity wants a lawsuit case with every single game publisher out there.

 

Or

They could just skip the onerous process of somehow "tracking installs" and the sh*tstorm that'll invite, and propose a competitive revenue share model as per the industry standard.

But, that would be sane, and the sanity ship has sailed

 

Revenue share has been a popular topic. I don't think it would work though, at least not in time to fix things for Unity. It would still only be applicable to Unity versions past a certain date because for developers the biggest risk is retroactive TOS changes, the actual costs are secondary to that. Every single game in development now, and version of Unity currently released would need to be exempt.

That means it would be several years before companies could justify moving to a later version of Unity, and a couple years past that where games released under that revenue share agreement were being published and making money. While this could definitely help them long term, they need short term solutions too. That's the issue, because the only way to institute a short term solution is a retroactive TOS change but rightfully not a single developer will stand for that.

 

Wow, so basically every month for each game on its respective release date you will need to submit the monthly gross income? Or we send them the calculation of the last 12 months every month, we do the calculation, it's easier for them!

At this point they should put the pro license at 5% as unreal, even with the license I'm sure many would prefer.
Plus he would make more money

Good joke but as a future solo dev here is what I can do:

I upgrade to a pro license if I reach close to $200k and the threshold increases to 1M$

• Once the income threshold is almost reached (990k$) I make the game free... and there are no more installation problems or fraud

• On the other hand, profitability level...

Afterwards the game must work otherwise there is already no danger ahead !

 

Incorrect, Unreal is open source.[/QUOTE]

It wasn't overpriced, Unity had overcosts, made big acquisitions and mergers and tried to grow as fast as possible to go public with a big IPO. Check this threads on Twitter to get a better picture. https://twitter.com/MattMirrorFish/status/1702654023277351359

When net income is low, you can increase revenue or decrease costs. Costs were and are too high, it's not only (if at all) a revenue problem.

 

Sure will, except for the fact that Epic isn't publicly listed that is.

 

Yes, in case anyone is wondering, Unreal does provide source code. It is proprietary but at least you do have access to it.

 

Sure they will never remove the thresholds in the future right?

Right?



Right?

 

Tencent is. And as the other unpleasant man already corrected, they own 40% of Epic.

Blackrock is one of Unity's larger institutional shareholders. Blackrock is Tencent's 3rd largest institutional shareholder. Still looks like conflict of interest to me.

 

Agreed. Even if Unity does a 180, the damage to trust is done.

If this exact same plan was presented with a cap to prevent overcharges and only applied to games using 2024.x or something like that, there would been very little pushback.

But the way this was handled reeks of desperation and c-level mismanagement and it's no wonder people who actually make a living using Unity are seriously reevaluating their future technology choices.

 

Nah, just someone thinking they're clever at Unity in placing a carrot/stick to get you to upgrade through the subscription tiers and join their ad service.

In a way, it tries to mimic Unreal's carrot of self-reporting excludes you from the first $1M.

They failed to realize the Unreal stick was only an implicit 'we'll audit you when we notice you're making more than $1M" By making the Unity 'install tracking' explicit, every eyeball fell on it immediately rendering the carrot immaterial and all the expected human emotions 101 came to the front.

The we'll waive install fees if you join our ad network is the same as Epic's Store waiver.

 

Who the heck has the money, the time and the energy to bring a multibillion corporation to court where their million dollar lawyers will F*** us over even further? Not to mention that most of us likely reside in countries where Unity is not even present. International litigation is not easy, is not cheap and out of scope for most but the biggest studios. The bill and license cancellation will arrive much sooner than the litigation will go through the motions.

 

You are correct, they will not remove the thresholds in the future.

They will remove them in the past instead!

 

Whose to say a troll won't develop a bot to constantly reinstall your game and farm it?

 

yeah and no installation tracking, only self reports. unitys management has seriously and without thinking basically announced that unity is becomeing spyware/maleware. its honestly unbelievable that they didnt think about the damage this would cause.

they are actually harming their own ecosystem and every company that uses their software. they really shot themselves in both feet and are now aiming for the head

 

There are already scripts around, someone posted the code in this thread even

 

Not to mention refunds. Oh what's that? Somebody bought the game, installed it on their PC, laptop, Steam Deck, and then got a refund because it didn't work on the Steam Deck (or it was buggy or they just didn't like it)? Congrats, the developer has been charged for 3 installs while making no sale.

 

More than that, how can anyone reasonably contest the numbers Unity propose in the first place when installs could be per device and the only way to actually gather that information would be to have your own app call home to your own servers so you have specific logs for this sort of thing?

There's no actual way for a person to go "we only have this many installs" without shuffling a privacy violation down to the end user, something that can not just be expensive, but legally problematic in many jurisdictions because you have to be extremely careful about what data you collect.

 

You're spamming.

 

More than half of all the posts you've ever made are in this thread.

 

how many here didnt get any work with unity done since 5 days?

 

Most of what I've been doing over the past few days is stuff like reworking my shaders to function in UE5.

 

Based on what?

Unity didn't invent mono / C#. They didn't invent DirectX or OpenGL or Vulkan. They didn't invent PhysX. They didn't invent any of the formats used by all the various asset types...

Unity's worth is in the code and assets from the community that work with Unity. Take that away and explain how Unity is better than Godot or Flax or any number of other free game engines.

 

Been spending all my time in blender.

 

I have been refactoring my gameplay loop to work in Unreal and GODOT.

 

Except, when has that ever not been the decline of the project? Usually it results in multiple former contributers deciding to start that new branch and realize their personal vision on the software (influencing it more than in the past). The result is a split of workforce which is deadly for something as huge as a game engine.
Not to mention that even without that, Godot is several, if not many years away from Unity's feature level.

 

The developer will just have to dispute the number as fraud, then Unity will need to prove it beyond any reasonable doubt how they came up with it.

If their system is accurate will have to expose it at that time, if not will be charged.

 

You're spamming as well.

 

Except Unity doesn't need to do that. In fact, they can't, because the metrics they're using are entirely proprietary.

https://twitter.com/unity/status/1701689241456021607

You've done nothing but post one-line replies and not at all contribute to any ongoing conversation. Wanna try that again?

 

exactly my point, if it is as you say, they will loose in court every single time

 

Godot Engine is MIT license, so the Godot foundation does NOT own Godot Engine.

So even if the Godot foundation goes completely crazy one day and everyone is angry at them. The community can just pick the latest MIT godot and fork the project and continue from there...

 

Except taking them to court is an expensive process and puts the onus entirely on the end user. Are you really so short-sighted as to be unable to see the problem there? To say nothing of how long that process would take in the first place?

 

I don't think unity will ever take someone to court if he doesn't pay, unless it's for massive amounts, it will just remove the license so you can no longer use it, and maybe they trigger a killswitch and the game won't go past the splashscreen

 

The point is that at that moment you'll have a working usable codebase that you can use for current project. Then someone else can pick the torch. You can also pick the torch. Doesn't matter if it is in decline if it works and usable.

With proposed changes, it doesn't matter what features Unity has. It is absolutely "no deal, turn back, avoid at all costs" scenario. So when picking an engine for the project, this sort of thing simply removes unity from possible choices.

 

Yeah, we're all very tense and waiting for news, but every time I come here its the same three people replying to each other in a giant reach around. Go spam somewhere else.

 

You don't even know what spamming is, huh.

 

I can see the problem of course, but my argument is that Unity would potentially risk many lawsuits that may loose, and i doubt they will go that way.

Until January they can add - change or remove a lot of things from this proposal.

 

Why would Unity be to avoid if can turn a profit in most cases and one that may be millions beyond Unreal offering with the 5%.

That does not make any sense business wise. The extra new cost can always be absorbed by increase the game price $0.1 or 0.02 etc in the case of low paid games.

In higher priced games the Unreal will eat you few million dollars more, so why would anyone ever go with that option for example ?

 

Little bit of mix-n-match presentation about Stride Engine (mainly how .Net and how nuget, but also how they use it in art installations and stuff) for those who are interested in it:

 

They're already going down that way. Them having a proprietary method means that a fraud dispute will likely not make it anywhere because fraud charges require enough evidence to point towards active malice. Which means a fraud investigation will likely have to be done, and that same investigation is still stacked towards Unity's favour because they can just say "due to privacy laws we really do have to guess." On top of all that, this puts the onus on the developer to prove they have fewer installs than Unity claims.

 

No you can't just increase the price 20c, again, your game once sold can be installed unlimited time until the buyer is dead.

 

Smells like butt licking..

 

Unity isn't on Unreal's level thats the only problem, plus with Unreal you pay under 4.5% if you make under 10MILLION under 3.8% if you make 5MILLION and 2.5% if you make 2MILLION for an insanely impressive engine

 

Developer will just report the actual sales number and if Unity number is much different i am sure the court will just ask Unity how they came up with it and if they say they guessed will loose, since this is clear fraud.

No judge in his right mind would accept guess as a charge method.

 

I've been reading up on Godot lol